ISO 15919 Transliteration of Devanagari and related Indic scripts into Latin characters is an international standard for the transliteration of Indic scripts to the Latin alphabet formed in 2001. It uses diacritics to map the much larger set of Brahmic consonants and vowels to the Latin script.
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ISO 15919 is an international standard on the romanization of many Indic scripts, which was agreed upon in 2001 by a network of the national standards institutes of 157 countries.[1]
Another standard, United Nations Romanization Systems for Geographical Names (UNRSGN), was developed by the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN)[2] and covers many Indic scripts.
ALA-LC was approved by the Library of Congress and the American Library Association and is a US standard. IAST is not a standard as no formally approved document exists for it but a convention developed in Europe for the transliteration of Sanskrit rather than that of Indic scripts.
As a notable difference, both international standards, ISO 15919 and UNRSGN transliterate anusvāra as ṁ, while ALA-LC and IAST use ṃ for it.
The table below shows the differences between ISO 15919, UNRSGN and IAST for Devanagari transliteration.
| Devanagari | ISO 15919 | UNRSGN | IAST | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ए / े | ē | e | e | To distinguish between long and short 'e' in Dravidian languages. 'E' now represents ऎ / ॆ. |
| ओ / ो | ō | o | o | To distinguish between long and short 'o' in Dravidian languages. 'O' now represents ऒ / ॊ. |
| ऌ / ॢ | l̥ | l̤ | ḷ | In ISO 15919, ḷ is used to represent ळ. |
| ॡ / ॣ | l̥̄ | ḹ | For consistency with l̥ | |
| ं | ṁ | ṁ | ṃ | In ISO 15919, ṃ is used to specifically represent Gurmukhi Tippi ੰ. |
| ऋ / ृ | r̥ | ṛ | ṛ | In ISO 15919, ṛ is used to represent ड़. |
| ॠ / ॄ | r̥̄ | ṝ | ṝ | For consistency with r̥ |
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